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Intrinsic Alexa Sounds no longer play on Sonos

  • 5 October 2017
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I have two Alexa's which are directly linked to Sonos players, One is a Play:5 and another a connect, in both cases the Echo is connected via a 3.5 mm audio cable. After today's update sounds intrinsic to Alexa, such as "What time is is" no longer play through the sonos speakers. If it disconnect the patch cord the sounds play just fine on the echo itself and other audio such as audiobooks/Spotify/SiriusXM stream as well as alarm and timer tones play just fine (and yes it's by patch cable not the new method, if I unplug the cable the echo plays the music via it's speakers). The sounds which are missing are the ones using the "Alexa" voice.
I've tried disabling the app, forgetting all the speakers and then setting it all up again which didn't correct the issue. Any ideas this is a rather annoying bug.
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Best answer by Ryan S 5 October 2017, 23:23

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Huh, that's odd. Have you checked the app to see if the autoplay function is still set up? I've actually disconnected my dot from my PLAY:5 now, but I was having so much difficulty in having it "tickle" the autoplay function that I had to turn back on the request sounds for Start of Request, so that by the time it recognized an autoplay state, I could hear the response on the PLAY:5.
Not sure about first part, but most people set the Echo to play the acknowledgement tone in order to wake up the line in before Alexa responds.
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It's definitely the connection between the Echo and the speaker because if I hook the echo up to a computer speaker or any other speaker it works just fine. There's got to be something about how the tones are done from the lexa voice that's different than standard music
It's an issue with the line-in level - the sound still works but it's very very quiet. The issue has already been raised in another topic:

https://en.community.sonos.com/amazon-alexa-and-sonos-229102/amazon-dot-and-play-5-using-the-line-in-6791469
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It's an issue with the line-in level - the sound still works but it's very very quiet. The issue has already been raised in another topic:

https://en.community.sonos.com/amazon-alexa-and-sonos-229102/amazon-dot-and-play-5-using-the-line-in-6791469


I answered this thread a little earlier, but I'll repost the answer below here. For the sake of board cleanliness, I'm going to close this thread. If you have any followups or other questions about this, please feel free to reply to the thread above.

I can speak to what you're experiencing. It's part of a feature that's called "ducking". What this means is that when you say Alexa, the audio playing on all Sonos and Alexa devices "ducks" down, or lowers, so that the microphones can properly hear you. If you have the Alexa skill enabled for Sonos, the players will all do this when you issue a command.

The problem you're running into is that the line-in on the player is ducking too. So Alexa is responding appropriately, out the line-in, to a player that has the audio "ducked", so you can barely hear it.

This is an interesting situation since everything is technically working exactly as it's supposed to.

There isn't a way to prevent the "ducking" at the moment, but we've heard this from others and I'm making sure to spread the feedback on to the team for you.

For now, there are 2 ways to go:
1. Disable the Alexa skill for Sonos, your player will be working the way it was before the update.
2. Disconnect the line in from the Dot, and you'll have the responses for your Alexa commands playing out of the Dot itself, and not over the line in.